From Substitute Wife to the CEO's Obsession novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: A Small Commission

Pilar Ortiz's workshop in the Colonia Americana smelled of sawdust and coffee, and Lorena loved it more than any room in her husband's house.

Pilar stood at the long table in her leather apron with her reading glasses pushed up into her grey hair.

On the table sat the prototype of Lorena's chair.

It had a plain walnut frame, a seat that tilted without a lever, and a back support Lorena had redrawn half a dozen times.

"Sit," Pilar said.

Lorena sat.

"Lean back. Lean forward. Reach for the phone."

Lorena did all three.

Pilar crossed her arms.

"My back doesn't hurt," she said. "I have had a bad back since 2009, and it does not hurt in your chair."

"That's good?"

"That's a purchase order." Pilar slapped a sheet of paper on the table. "A clinic in Zapopan wants forty for its waiting rooms. Eighteen thousand pesos in advance, the rest on delivery."

Lorena stared at the number.

It was the first money she had ever earned that her mother could not call a favor.

"They asked for my name?" she said.

"They asked for the designer. I said Lorena Mendiola. Is that wrong?"

"No. That's right."

She had signed drawings with her own name for years.

Nobody here asked whose wife she was.

"Good. Now I need the support changed here," Pilar said, tapping the frame. "If you thin the rail you save weight, and the clinic's nurses won't hate us when they carry them."

Lorena picked up a pencil from behind her ear and bent over the drawing.

She thinned the rail by four millimeters and moved the joint back an inch.

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